1) I love the aesthetics and the game play. First time I learned about this was reading a copy of 101 basic computer games during summer break. I didn't have a computer back then but was fascinated by the book, so I pried my parents until they got me one just so that I could program games.
2) I ported the game to a mobile web app/PWA [1] trying to keep the original feeling, but the lack of a usable keyboard meant the UX had to be drastically changed. Also I'm super-proud of the software architecture I picked which is all event-driven and applies the Model-view-presenter-controller pattern [2]
I gasped when I saw this screen, it was the first game I played on a computer, my science teacher's TRS-80 he brought to school. My friend Jim and I would take turns sitting at the keyboard and calling out commands to type. I haven't seen that screen in over 40 years. Later that year I got my first programming job writing some program in basic to track grades for the teacher. Goodness it brings back a flood of memories, the black science lab table the computer was on, the green or was it amber screen, the floppy disk drive thunk when you closed it and the sounds of the drive working. Our excitement when we would destroy an enemy, or make it safely to a space station. What a great time we had with that simple machine.
I played this on an IBM 370/158 mainframe. I got in trouble for printing out its FORTRAN source code - I was accused of wasting university resources. But I had printed it out because I was working on an assignment to implement a game, and I wanted to look at a game implementation as an example. Admittedly the game I was implementing was the card game Patience, but still.
Do you still have that print out?
It would be awesome to try it.
(I have the original multi wars, written in basic(Dartmouth college), it was a print only game, but multi user for anyone on campus who could join in. One of these days!
One of the first games I ever played. My mom was a secretary at a local University and the computer lab manager set 15 (1978-79) year old me up at a paper printing PDP terminal and cut me loose. I would take the paper printouts home and pour over them.
There is a version in the bsdgames package in Debian¹, IIRC it has been there as long as I've been using Debian (many moons ago!) and I'm pretty sure it was in RedHat with a similar issue name back then too, so probably still is.
Not sure how true to any other version it is, for there have been many, but there will be a source package (and links to upstream of it is still active) to play with for this implementation at least.
The Debian version is BSD Trek, which was also a SST-like extension of Trek. Sounds like BSD Trek and SST diverged around 1978: http://www.catb.org/~esr/super-star-trek/
That link's from Eric S. Raymond himself, who has a (still maintained!) GitLab repo for SST2K, under a BSD license: https://gitlab.com/esr/super-star-trek
That link also mentions Jason Shankel's OpenTrek, which was a GNU GPL-licensed, cross-platform, TNG-flavored port of SST in rudimentary 3D, ca. 1995-1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20070210032231/http://shankel.be... (the source download link on that IA snapshot works)
WOW. This brings back a FLOOD of memories as one of the first and most favorite games to play as a kid. This an a pirate game the name of which I cannot recall.
Used to love this genre. I have fond memories of a copy of EGA Trek bought for like $10 on a floppy at a bookstore or similar. There was also a text-mode trek-like called BEGIN that was great.
I wrote a TI calculator version that was a fun distraction, and started in on a 486/pentium caliber trek clone, incorporating more of the Berman era Trek themes but never made it too far.
I loved this game as a kid. I played the ega trek version. It really captured my imagination and I have often thought now to extend it by having more active NPCs doing things. Maybe even having science missions. I'm excited to see this again.
My Dad worked at Wake Forest University when I was in elementary school. One of my favorite "toys" was an amber-screen terminal in his study, which connected to the HP 3000 mainframe at WFU.
I spent untold hours and hours and hours playing Super Star Trek. I loved it SO MUCH.
The worst was when I was busy blasting Klingons, and someone in the house would pick up the phone in another room and disrupt my modem connection.
This is great. It reminds me of the BASIC program I wrote in the early 90s to simulate a star trek ship's state. Me and my friends would take apart the couch and use other things to build a "bridge" so we could be the crew (almost like a LARP kind of thing), and the "engineer" used the program to help move combat/encounters along. I really wish my younger self had thought to keep it around.
So fun on fan-fold paper from an Anderson-Jacobson 860 terminal connected to the local Xerox/Honeywell Sigma 9 mainframe. The sound of the pins in the print head spitting out rows of asterisks punctuated by an occasional star, planet, or starship was hypnotic.
Yeah. I played a version of it on some sort of HP time sharing system using an old school mechanical TTY when I was in high school, and I graduated in 1975.
Wow, I remember playing this on the Commodore 64! As soon as that screen appeared in my browser I recognized it even though the DOS UI looks a bit different.
2) I ported the game to a mobile web app/PWA [1] trying to keep the original feeling, but the lack of a usable keyboard meant the UX had to be drastically changed. Also I'm super-proud of the software architecture I picked which is all event-driven and applies the Model-view-presenter-controller pattern [2]
[1] https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/superstartrek
[2] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2019/04/14/the-model-view-pr...